Firsts in Fiction
Debut Novels
By Gwenda Bond
Feb 10, 2012

Debut novelists can be counted on to bring fresh voices, diverse story lines, and singular characters.

From across the globe and a wide variety of backgrounds, this season’s neophytes offer tales dark and light, with such characters as French ingénues, legendary cricket stars, and talking platypuses. Here, the stories behind 11 particularly promising newcomers.

‘Variations’ on a Theme

John Donatich is no stranger to publishing. Over a storied career spanning 20+ years, the 51-year-old director of Yale University Press has shepherded the work of such prominent authors as Christopher Hitchens and Steven Pinker into print. But he never gave up on the dream of publishing a novel of his own. After writing the well-received 2005 memoir, Ambivalence: A Love Story, about his marriage with wife and fellow industry veteran Betsy Lerner, he became interested in the Catholic archdioceses that were closing down along the eastern seaboard.

“I don’t consider myself a religious person, but the idea of someone who gets up and contemplates the good life every day, without hipster skepticism and irony, is appealing,” says Donatich.

That someone became Father Dominic, the beleaguered protagonist of The Variations (Holt, Feb.), a priest who loses his church, his mentor, and even the ability to pray. The priest’s blog draws interest from an editor in New York as he tries to help a young pianist master Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Donatich jokes, “I was obsessed with three endangered things—classical music, the Catholic Church, and novelists. That’s this novel.”

Jack Macrae, the special projects editor at Henry Holt who acquired the book from Bill Clegg of William Morris Endeavor, was instantly intrigued by the main character’s journey. “He is spiritually disillusioned, and that’s a wonderful way for a priest to present himself,” Macrae says. “This novel poses the big questions we all at times have to face.”

A Fantasy Revolution Gets Real

G. Willow Wilson’s memoir, Butterfly Mosque: A Young Woman’s Journey to Love and Islam (2010), chronicled her conversion to Islam and her move from America to Cairo. What she wasn’t able to include was what she saw as a growing movement online, “emerging digital history” taking place on social media. Many people were still questioning whether the Internet would have a true political impact on the Middle East.

“It was a tough sell at the time, so none of that was included in the memoir,” says Wilson. “But I had made friends and met colorful characters in the digital Muslim community and I knew I had to do something with all that.”

The result is Alif the Unseen, a blend of urban fantasy and cyberpunk with echoes of a very real-life revolution. Alif is an Arab-Indian hacker who protects people from ominous electronic security sweeps in an unnamed Middle Eastern state. When he falls in love with the wrong girl, he’s drawn into an underground where he discovers The Thousand and One Days, a secret book written by the jinn. Wilson has previously written comics for DC and Marvel, and now her novel is drawing comparisons to Neil Gaiman and Philip Pullman as well as interest from international publishers.

Amy Hundley, Grove senior editor and rights director, bought the novel via Warren Frasier at John Hawkins & Associates, and watched the Arab Spring emerge while editing the book. “It seemed incredibly prescient as we started to work on it,” she says.

Gotham Gossip

Cristina Alger’s The Darlings is set in the high stakes world of financial sector New York—the world she grew up in and almost found herself building a career in. Though she planned to work in academia or publishing while an English major at Harvard, after her father’s death on 9/11 she moved back to New York to be close to her mother and got a job at Goldman Sachs that then segued into corporate law.

During her downtime from bankruptcy cases, she began writing a novel about a prominent family—the Darlings—in the midst of the financial crisis in 2008, pitted against SEC attorneys and journalists rushing to uncover the truth. “I wanted to capture 2008 and how it impacted people,” says Alger, who will turn 31 on her book’s February release day. “It was a creative release.”

A friend introduced her to agent Pilar Queen of McCormick and Williams, who agreed to represent Alger after reading the first hundred pages. Once the manuscript was complete, it went to Pamela Dorman at her eponymous imprint at Penguin. “When I first read it, it reminded me of a kind of novel I hadn’t seen in a long time. The type of novel Dominick Dunne wrote, with society, money, and intrigue, but for our generation,” says Dorman.

For her part, Alger feels blessed that she was able to leave law and is now writing full-time. “I knew this was what I wanted to do,” she says.

Adventure Down Under

Howard Anderson’s biography on the jacket of Albert of Adelaide (Hachette/Twelve, July) reads like a novel of its own—he’s flown helicopters in Vietnam; worked on fishing boats in Alaska and in steel mills in Pittsburgh, Pa.; done a stint in Hollywood (his biggest success as a scriptwriter was writing the sequel to Annie); and is currently a defense attorney in New Mexico. And at 66, he’s also a first-time novelist. Asked about the publisher’s bio, he quips, “They have no idea. It’s much abridged.”

It’s only fitting that such a real-life character would give birth to one of the season’s most unusual protagonists: a talking duck-billed platypus searching for “Old Australia” through an outlandish outback. The novel began 20 years ago as a bedtime story for a then-girlfriend’s daughter. In 2009, Anderson picked it back up and finished it, and through his old Hollywood connections finally managed to get it into the hands of powerhouse agent Nicole Aragi.

When Aragi sent the book to Cary Goldstein at Twelve, the publisher and editor-in-chief had just published The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, the tale of a talking chimpanzee. Said Goldstein, “There’s no way. I’ll be branded as the talking animal guy.” After reading it, however, he put in a pre-emptive bid. He describes the book, which will have a 50,000 first printing, as “the ultimate kids’ book for adults.”

And how does Anderson feel about this latest chapter in an unusual life? “This is just another great adventure.”

Secret Passions Go Public

Carole DeSanti, v-p and editor-at-large for the Penguin Group, is well-known as a champion for women’s voices in literature, having worked with Terry McMillan, Tracy Chevalier, Marisha Pessl, and many others over the years.

“The fact that she’s done such a great job for all these other writers makes it all the better that she’s been secretly writing this book the whole time,” says Adrienne Brodeur, consulting editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, who acquired DeSanti’s The Unruly Passions of Eugénie R. (Mar.) from Robin Straus of the Robin Straus Agency.

The novel follows young Eugénie’s struggles with life and love through an absinthe-soaked Second Empire transformed by social upheaval. DeSanti first became interested in the historical milieu of the novel’s setting—1860s and ’70s France—two decades ago, collecting materials with no particular goal.

In 1999, she took a leave of absence from Penguin and applied for a fellowship at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center to do more research. “I had heard a sentence from this voice: ‘How does a woman learn to doubt herself?’ I kept getting a feeling from her,” DeSanti says. So for several years she worked on the story on weekends and vacations, eventually taking another leave.

She laughs at the description of her writing process as clandestine, but says it applies to how she had to change her thinking. Says the author, “I had to learn to not have business ideas about what works in the marketplace, the credos we think we have to live by, so I could write.”

A Shift in Gravity

The Indonesian earthquake and tsunami happened when 31-year-old Karen Thompson Walker was pursuing her M.F.A. at Columbia. She was struck by the revelation that the force had been powerful enough to shorten the length of the day by microseconds.

“I thought it was so haunting that something we think of as unchanging— sunrise and sunset, the length of a day—could be changed,” says Walker.

She wrote a brief story and set it aside for a few years, but then picked it back up while working as an editor at Simon & Schuster, sensing it could be a novel. The Age of Miracles (Random House, June) has a more extreme premise than its inspiration—11-year-old Julia and her family wake up one morning to news that the Earth’s rotation is slowing, causing each day to grow first to 25 hours, and then 26. Set against this apocalyptic circumstance is Julia’s coming-of-age story. The book has already sold in 25 foreign territories, and River Road Entertainment, the production company behind Brokeback Mountain and The Tree of Life, has optioned movie rights.

Random House executive v-p and associate publisher Kate Medina snapped up the title from Eric Simonoff of William Morris Endeavor. “When I first read this book, I couldn’t sit down. I felt as if it had really happened to me,” says Medina. “It shows the fragility of everything, and yet it’s affirmative because the people keep going.”

Luxembourg Redux

It wasn’t Chris Pavone’s two decades as an editor at various houses that ultimately inspired his hotly anticipated debut thriller, The Expats (Crown, Mar.). Instead, it was becoming a stay-at-home dad for the first time, after his wife, Madeline McIntosh, took a job launching the Kindle overseas that required a family move to Luxembourg.

“I was one of the only men in my world. At the international school pickup, it was all expat wives and three other guys,” says Pavone, 43. He began taking language and cooking classes, again populated by expat wives. “I started to see the world from their point of view and then to write from that viewpoint.”

Once they returned to the U.S., Pavone got serious about finishing his draft, about how expat wife Kate Moore’s normal routine gives way to espionage. Then he spent another year showing the novel to people—mostly professionals who he knew from his time in publishing—and revising.

Once he felt like the book was ready, he approached agent David Gernert of the Gernert Company, who he knew from Gernert’s tenure as Doubleday’s editor-in-chief. After the book was submitted, Pavone figured nothing would happen immediately. An offer to pre-empt came in the next day, from Crown editor Zachary Wagman.

“I was struck by how sophisticated and perfectly crafted it was—a sleek puzzle,” says Wagman.

A Poetic Renaissance

At first, poet Regina O’Melveny didn’t realize she’d started a novel. She began to write a series of prose poems chronicling strange maladies and gradually puzzled out that they were from a single character’s voice.

In The Book of Madness and Cures (Little, Brown, Apr.), the central character of Gabriella Mondini, a rare woman practicing medicine in 16th-century Venice, pursues her missing physician father across Europe. While the novel may sound like a flight of fancy, it’s grounded in O’Melveny’s childhood in La Mesa, Calif. Her mother was an painter, a first-generation immigrant from Italy, and their house was full of books with Renaissance imagery. Her father’s disappearance after her parents’ divorce while she was a teenager was also a major influence.

“Sifting through those memories was part of this,” says O’Melveny, who recently turned 60. She also faced technical challenges. “Because I was comfortable as a poet, I really had to learn how to shift gears to make the story move.”

But perhaps the hardest part was tackling the business. After a mismatch with an agent, she shelved the book for two years. Then she read an article in Poets and Writers about several young agents and began to query, eventually choosing Dan Lazar of Writers House.

Little, Brown editor-in-chief Judy Clain was intrigued by Lazar’s inclusion of a letter from the author with the manuscript, and even more by the book itself. “This is gorgeous storytelling with a great character that layers in an irresistible way,” says Clain.

Exploring the Axis of Evil

The characters of All Woman and Springtime by Brandon Jones (Algonquin, May) are far from his direct experience. Young girls Gi and Il-sun become friends growing up in a North Korean forced-labor camp. Eventually they escape and make it to the U.S., but human traffickers intercede on their journey. Over the course of the novel, which Algonquin compares to Memoirs of a Geisha, the author gets in close not just to the North Korean girls but to those who sell them.

Senior editor Andra Miller, who acquired the novel from Wendy Weil of the Wendy Weil Agency, says that when the novel first came in, the editorial board loved it, but had questions. “None of us could believe it was a first novel. We wanted to know how this guy could possibly know all this,” she says.

Jones, a metal sculptor who lives in Hawaii, became interested in writing about North Korea after President Bush’s speech about the “axis of evil.” The economy had put his metal business on hold, and it seemed time to finally write the novel he’d always wanted to. Jones read and watched whatever he could find about North Korea and related subjects. But he says empathy was the real key.

“I try to write from within the emotions of characters and feel what they’re feeling,” says Jones. “I had to put myself into some pretty dark frames of mind.”

The Universal Language of Sports

Shehan Karunatilaka was born in Sri Lanka in 1975 and describes growing up in Colombo “amidst bombs and curfews,” the kind of language the colorful characters in his debut, The Legend of Pradeep Mathew (Graywolf, May), might use. The novel—which recently won the $50,000 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature—tells the story of an aging sportswriter with a bad liver who heads out with a friend to search Sri Lanka for the title’s legendary cricket bowler, uncovering secrets about the country and encountering a six-fingered coach and a Tamil Tiger warlord.

Having also lived in London, Karunatilaka got the novel’s idea while on a vacation to see the Police play a gig at Madison Square Garden and was inspired to quit his job and try his hand at writing. .

“In this case, the research involved watching cricket in the mornings and hanging out with drunks in the afternoon. Didn’t seem like hard work, even though it was,” says Karunatilaka. “To write the book, I had to become a cricket obsessive for two years.”

Graywolf publisher Fiona McCrae first heard buzz about the novel while she was visiting India. When she arrived back in the U.S., Random House UK had submitted the novel for consideration. “It’s an exuberant book,” McCrae says. “It’s rare to find something that relishes in itself that way.”

Holding onto Hope

Vaddey Ratner’s journey to writing In the Shadow of the Banyan (Simon & Schuster, Aug.) begins with silence. When she was five years old, the Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia. An estimated two million people died between 1975 and 1979 in the genocide—including all the members of Ratner’s family except her and her mother. They managed to get to a refugee camp over the Thai border when Ratner was nine. She was practicing a self-imposed silence when an immigration official forced her to tell her story or risk being sent back to Cambodia.

“It was a revelation for me. It left an impression that speaking about what had happened was not wrong if I do it in a way that is honorable and saves not only me but my mother,” says Ratner.

Ratner and her mother emigrated to the U.S., living first in Missouri and later Minnesota. Now in Maryland, Ratner carried the need to tell the story of what they had endured, but it was going to Cambodia for her husband’s job that unlocked the right approach. She wrote a novel using the perspective of seven-year-old Raami.

“It’s not the graphic details that leave in me a sense of wanting to do something,” she explains. “It’s the way an author uses language to hint at one’s faith in humanity that stirs me to action.”

Executive editor Trish Todd, who acquired the novel from Emma Sweeney of the Emma Sweeney Agency, calls it “an important debut.” She says, “Vaddey’s an amazing soul—she’s come out of this experience a survivor with forgiveness and love in her heart. And she’s a brilliant writer.”